ghost
by fall from stars
Summary: ONESHOT—Out of a dream. .ClarkxAlicia.


**A/N:** My first foray into_ Smallville_ territory. Supernatural and strange Clark/Alicia follows; you have been aptly warned.

For Michael, who I will haunt if I go first.

**He who was living is now dead.  
We who were living are now dying.**

--  
_T.S. Eliot_

**And it is in dying  
that we are born to eternal life.**

--  
_The Prayer of St. Francis_

**Ghost**

She comes in winter.

She comes when everything is buried six feet under snow, and the wide Kansas sky has gone grey with clouds. She comes when the farm is quiet, expectant, waiting for the sun to come closer, come home. She comes when the spaces between the loft steps are bigger, when the shadows in his room go farther, when the rest of the world is stuck in a rut.

She comes when he's in the middle of chapter six of his calculus textbook.

She comes when he's between limits that do, and do not, exist.

She comes in winter with one question.

"Do you spend your Friday nights alone, too?"

It's a voice he wants to believe in, like he believes in a lot of things, but this is different; he can't believe this.

And yet he breathes out her name, a cloud on his lips: "_Alicia_—"

Because he turns around and there she is, _oh God, Alicia_, clear, transparent, nearly invisible. Like something out of a book, like something out of a movie. Like something out of a nightmare.

Out of a dream.

It has to be a dream. He will wake up with a sour taste in his mouth, buried underneath spare blankets with his hands under him. And it will be a dream. And the sun will rise in a world without her. The way it has for a while now.

"This isn't happening," Clark says as he's busy pinching himself, battling logic. She bats her eyelashes, innocently. "This isn't real, you're—"

"Dead," Alicia whispers, not disappearing with twenty more pinches applied, brisk and simple. Her hands are 'round the rope burns on her neck, trying to cover them. "I know."

He swallows, struggles to find words. "Are you an illusion?"

She doesn't blink. "Fooling both of us if I am," she says, trying to smile. The air is heavy with thoughts, unspoken lies.

She looks away, and then back up again.

"Can I touch you?" she asks, quietly.

Simultaneously, they both think that it seems so strange, out of place, for her to ask permission now.

But he nods his consent, and as soon as her fingers touch his, he realizes he should have said no.

Alicia is colder than any blizzard, colder than anything he's ever felt. She is _worse_ than dry ice, and he swears he can see his fingertips going black with lack of oxygen, heat, everything he suddenly _needs_.

And there's terror in his eyes, and she can feel his life drifting, moving, in _her_, instead of in him, where it belongs.

It's a truly terrifying experience that leaves Clark out of breath, his knuckles dry and white.

It's a truly terrifying experience that leaves Alicia wide-eyed, breaking away, heavy, guilty.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, even though she ripples, not really there.

Some time later, she returns, handing ibuprofen and water to him. He dry swallows the pill, heats the water almost scalding hot, a nice contrast to his frosted fingernails, but it doesn't stop the_ pain_.

She almost makes a pique about him being indestructible, unbreakable. But she knows there is no place for it here, so she struggles to think of something else.

"You'll be okay. I'm trying to keep you on your toes," she says, a compromise. "For what you're going to be, Clark."

He looks at her, quietly, pressing without saying anything. She purses her lips shut.

"I'm not allowed to tell anyone," she says, looking at the floor, pretty as a broken picture. "Not even you."

---

He notices one day that she tends not to hang anywhere, suspended, as she did in death, as she did in his arms. **  
**

She makes a habit of sitting down in corners, making a space for herself at the edge of his bed or nearby his telescope, trying to make herself warmer, more human, so she can touch him again.

Most times when he catches her eye she is faraway, and he says, _you may as well be at the North Pole_ and she angrily informs him, _I'm not there, I don't want to be there, I'm _here, and has to fight the overwhelming urge to slap him or kiss him or both.

This puts him in a foul mood, and there is little she can do to help. She settles in the extreme angle where the stairs start. She sits there, an ashtray presence, fading away, disintegrating.

She whispers in his ear, "I'm sorry. I can't change. Death fixes you. Freezes you right up to stop you. And it shows you all sorts of things, so sometimes you're not always there. And…and it leaves you always cold."

And he smiles, forgives her.

And he shines so bright, because he is so amazingly lucky and perfect and _alive_, and she can hardly stand it.

---

The day he discovers he can fly is not far from now, so she begins to spin the dream around in his head. He is still stunned by an experience that feels so _real_, of twenty-seven thousand feet in the air and no airplane aisle beneath his feet, but seems to adjust well enough.

She likes taking him far-off places while he dreams, and on the fifth night of the dreams she takes him as far up as she can go. From where they are, they can see distant stars and the midnight sun and the moon impossibly large. Only astronauts have been granted as pretty a view as this, and even then they were trapped underneath billion-dollar steel and glass oxygen tanks; Clark and Alicia are much luckier.

"Those clouds we're seeing," she says, knowingly because she knows things now, her finger pointing away at them, "they're planets dying. Dying ten thousand light-years ago. Isn't that strange?"

He moves, struggling, towards them.

"No, Clark, _don't_," she warns, her arms outstretched, gone pink with northern light, a barrier between him and the exosphere, "there's no saving them, they're gone—"

"Just like you."

Immediately he regrets having said it, even if all he did was speak the truth.

And truth hits Alicia hard like a bullet, and she whispers_I'm sorry _before vanishing, holding herself oddly, in a mummy stance with deadened eyes.

She leaves Clark alone, high and cold at two hundred and seventy thousand feet above ground, the aurora swirling in and out of sight, and nothing green of hers to latch onto.

She is already gone.

---

Morning comes, with the sour taste and cold aurora light on his shoulders, and the first icicles are beginning to thaw. The shadows are shrinking, the clouds are drifting away.

She leaves with them, she leaves in spring.

She does not say goodbye.

Because life is for the alive, and there was simply no room for her anymore. She was trying to fit in a place she should have given up long ago.

Simultaneously, they both agree that it is easier this way.

---

(But some nights, even when he has grown very old, he swears he feels her lips on his, and a constant apology rings in his ears, _I'm sorry I couldn't tell you anything._

_And just look at you, Clark._

_Look at what you've become. You're special to everyone._

_Special to me._

And he wakes and sees tears that are not his.

Sees them drying on his pillow.)

---

**Soulmate, dry your eyes  
because soulmates never die.**

--  
Sleeping with Ghosts_  
Placebo_


End file.
